Top Ten Worst Linux Distros To Install On Your Hard Drive:

[igknighted]

I installed SUSE 10.1 in my laptop (it did not last installed a couple of hours), I can not swear that I saw "SUSE 10.1" in its "About" disclaimer, but I am pretty sure of it. I did not download it, it was burnt to me by a friend who also labeled the DVD as "SUSE 10.1". I dunno where did he get it (perhaps BitTorrent).

Suse has changed the name and spelling (or capitalization) of the distro many times recently. As long as it isn't Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop it is the OSS version (and since SLED is only at version 10, not 10.1, it must be the OSS version).

[julian67]

So your verdict that openSuse is the worst distro out there is based on less than 2 hours experience of something and you're not even sure what it was?????

beauty!

I like Ubuntu but I love these forums

[joe.turion64x2]

I did not need more than a couple of minutes to notice that SUSE ~10.1 was unable to connect to internet (it did not recognize my ethernet card) nor I could ear any sound (my sound card was unsupported as well) while the rest of Linux distros I installed (Mandriva, Ubuntu, Fedora) detected my network & recognized my sound system immediately after install.

"I don't have to bear this problems in SUSE" I thought and removed it to install Fedora. That is the beautiful thing of Linux: choice & freedom (if I were a Windows user I would have been screwed until proper drivers were released).

[LookTJ]

anything that has hardware problems. . Ubuntu ROCKS!

[julian67]

openSuse needs some time and care to install. It isn't like the Ubuntu installer which asks 6 questions and then installs everything under the sun including non-free drivers etc. It's important to check what your hardware is and make sure you don't erroneously deselect the drivers or omit to select them during install. For example I have Intel ipw2200 centrino wireless, the driver is open source and included by default but the firmware is not, so I have to make sure that I have the DVD or the non-oss CD and make sure the Intel firmware is selected. Possibly your ethenet and sound need similar binary blobs or non free drivers. openSUSE by default is totally open source and doesn't install anything with a non free license, but it gives you the possibility to choose to use non-free stuff like firmwares, Opera browser, Adobe Acrobat etc if you want to. Some people prefer the Ubuntu type installers because they are very very fast, usually giving you a working system in 30 minutes, and some prefer the total control available from an installer which lets you select/deselect individual packages, firmwares, desktop environment, drivers etc during the install. I guess it means you spend an extra hour on the install and have to have your brain switched on but if you do it right you have very little config to do on your first boot and your OS isn't loaded up with drivers and applications you didn't want. Also if you have limited disk space it helps a lot to choose not to install anything you don't need. With Ubuntu I can install it very quick and then spend an hour getting rid of open office and the other 50 things I didn't want and getting the stuff I do actually want from the repos.

I'm guessing that if Fedora detected your hardware ok then open drivers are available and almost certainly are on the openSUSE DVD, but without any hard info it's impossible to say for sure.

One thing I'm 100% sure of is that 2 hours is not enough time to assess a distro. In the case of openSUSE it's not even enough time to assess the installer Seriously it takes a while to get an idea about any distro. If you look at Ubuntu, openSUSE and Sackware they are all surprisingly different in terms of installers, package management, config tools, forums, even the way they customise (or not) the Linux kernel and the directory structure and the desktop environment. There's no way you can come to a credible conclusion about these things without at least months of using them. But I understand that it can be more important at first to have something that just works right away so you can start getting to grips with the distro so I hope you found everything you need in Ubuntu.